Report: Nearly 500,000 dead from US invasion of Iraq

A newly released study by American, Canadian and Iraqi researchers concludes that the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq has resulted in nearly half a million deaths.

Researchers from the University Collaborative Iraq Mortality Study published their findings in the open-access medical journal PLOS Medicine. They calculated 461,000 Iraqi deaths attributable to both violence caused by the invasion, occupation and subsequent insurgency, as well as to avoidable causes such as infrastructure collapse. More than 60 percent of the deaths resulted from violence, according to the study.

BBC reports researchers utilized hospital and mortuary records, government records, media reports and randomized surveys of some 2,000 Iraqi households in 100 geographical clusters across the country to calculate the death toll.

The new figures are far higher than the 114,000-126,000 estimated Iraqi dead published by Iraq Body Count, and significantly lower than the 655,000 people who American and Iraqi epidemiologists reported killed in a controversial 2006 study published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet.

The researchers who contributed to the study are from the University of Washington and Johns Hopkins University in the United States, Simon Fraser University in Canada and Mustansiriya University in Iraq.